Sunday, 24 August 2014

In these days – these last
days? – of hyperinformation and meganews, it is often tiny, incidental details
that are the most telling. The news is often to be found in the marginalia and
circumstances of reportage and, as Derrida and Freud teach us, much can be
found in apparently extraneous asides. The mainstream media (MSM) are masters
of padding and sanitising a story, ensuring that a cordon sanitaire is thrown
around their favoured groups and causes, and their language is as policed as
anything seen in the Soviet era, but what is increasingly emerging is the
blatant politicisation of the media. So it is with Ferguson.

For once, Googling ‘Ferguson’ does not bring
up on one’s screen the revolting, florid face of the triumphant Scottish
football manager. Ferguson
is an American town thrust forward by a fatal shooting. The facts are tedious
and unremarkable; as American, nowadays, as Mom and apple pie. What has made a
liberal-left cause celebre of the affair is not that the shooter was a law
enforcement officer and the victim an unarmed civilian, but that the policeman
was white and the dead man black.

The grievance industry has
swung into action. Thus, you’ll see Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Eric Holder, Barack
Obama and all the usual suspects informing a weary world that racism is once
again, has always been, stalking the land of the free. ‘Protests’ – primarily
in the form of looting, bomb-throwing and intimidation - are ongoing. One
nugget shines out from the ordure, however. Warner Todd Huston is a freelance writer for, among
others, Breitbart, and reports from the scene in Ferguson as follows;

“One constant
tonight on how the police have been handling the media is that they are asking
for ‘real media IDs’ and have been heard on the live feed saying only
‘conventional media’ will be allowed to participate in the media areas. It
seems the police are trying to differentiate between old-style, network, cable,
radio and print media people any anyone working for Internet-based outlets.”

Perhaps ‘conventional’ or ‘real’ fire-fighters
might be a requirement at a fire, not just well-meaning bystanders with buckets
of water, but the words used in this context show a strange new media world.
Paul Dacre, editor of The Daily Mail,
has already suggested at Leveson accreditation for the media, and he’s the man
who cost the UK
habeas corpus over one dead boy. But what represents the ‘unconventional’ or
‘unreal/false’ journalist?

Put simply, online commentators. Given
that western media are irredeemably left-wing, dominated by a progressivist
trend that has Gramsci as its totem and brooks no dissent of its politically
correct ‘narrative’, and given that online commentary is very often from the
opposing community, it is important to keep the latter away from anything as
mundane as facts on the ground.

And so, the most pertinent fact to
emerge from Ferguson
is the separation, by an increasingly militarised police force, of
‘conventional’ or ‘real’ journalists from net-based citizen journalists, often
unpaid. The journalist, the ‘real’ journalist, can now be defined as someone
who is paid to generate and display, for his employers, an inappropriate level
of concern over something which is none of his business, her business. It should
surprise no one, in this age of genuine transvaluation of all values, that it
should be someone as egregiously deleterious to democracy as Alastair Campbell
who reminds us that all journalism now is increasingly op-ed. If this is so,
why should the ‘conventional’ journalists be the only voice, given their
blatant progressivist agenda?

If you judged the implications of Ferguson by the MSM
narrative, you could be forgiven for thinking in the last fortnight that Jim
Crow was alive and well and open for business. Try this for size, from The Independent’s Kunal Dutta in the
issue of August 20;

“The race-relations crisis engulfing America in the aftermath of the shooting of
18-year-old Michael Brown intensified on Tuesday after police confirmed the
shooting of a second African-American man from St. Louis.”

The race-relations crisis engulfing America exists but is not exemplified by Ferguson. It is
exemplified by the Knockout Game, Beat Whitey Night, the events related in
Colin Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot. But not for ‘real’ journalism.

And those real journalists have
outriders now. The Ferguson
police have shown themselves every bit as determined to protect the narrative
concerning real – genuinely real – events as their masters. This sanctity of
narrative is directly mandated by the ruling class, the ‘establishment’ of Owen
Jones, given the minor adjustment that where Jones sees evil right-wingers, the
actual establishment have long been creatures of the far Left. And so only
approved commentators can be given access to the facts on the ground. Like a
doorman at a nightclub, if your name’s not down, you’re not coming in.

The ruling elites of the West face a
mounting problem, and it’s not IS (who have, amusingly, a press officer). It is
the partial handing over of opinion to citizens not of the media courtier class
via the internet, the greatest democratising invention since Gutenberg’s
printing press and moveable type. But the problem with the ‘net is that anyone
can use it; it is not the private plaything of the courtiers. The elites, as
always, love their courtiers. This is why thousands of IS decapitations produce
a deafening silence in the press and it takes the slaughter of a courtier –
James Foley – to shock the gauleiters.

The problem for the leaders thus
becomes how to muzzle the internet. There have already been tentative attempts
with hate-speech laws, the harassment of Tweeters and bloggers, Right to be
Forgotten, as well as Obama’s Soviet-style suggestions for internet policing.
The overarching problem for the elites, then, is that someone other than their
courtiers (who must remain silent about this) has seen that the Emperor has no
clothes.

Remember, whenever you read the MSM,
that this news was brought to you by people who are conventional and real. And
enjoy the internet while you can.

Saturday, 16 August 2014

For those of us for whom
literature has long ceased to be a relaxing pastime and has become instead the
greater part of our lives, re-reading books from the past is what we have in
place of the sacred. Repeated outings for a favourite book illuminate not just
the text, but its reader. It is one of the undoubted pleasures of ageing that
it becomes possible to read again books last closed a quarter of a century or
more previously.

I read Allan Blooms’ The Closing of the American Mind for the
first timemuch more recently, but it
is becoming more essential and prophetic by the year and, in a Panglossian best
of all possible worlds, would now have a companion volume dealing with what’s
left of the European mens cogitans. What
has become of American higher education – and not just at the hands of
liberalism – is both salutary and happening here. Bloom is equally at home
charting the importation of European existentialism into America as he
is describing the caving in of American campuses to ludicrous ‘Black Power’
groups and their hangers-on in the 1960s. The American academic atmosphere is
summed up beautifully as ‘nihilism without the abyss’. The book – with a
foreword by Saul Bellow, of whom more later – is a modern lament over the
post-modern and its idiocies. And you don’t have to travel to America to witness the destruction of higher
education; it has long since reached the UK
and mainland Europe. Media Studies, anyone?

Next in the back catalogue
was Malcolm Lowry’s 1941 novel Under the
Volcano. This haunting book describes the final day of alcoholic British
consul to Mexico Geoffrey Firmin, and is a nightmare of alienation, despair and
mescal. Lowry combines Joycean stylisation with the narrative control of Conrad.
I first read it over 20 years ago and I wasn’t ready for its studied
experimentalism. It’s a frightening book.

Underworld,
by
contemporary American master Don DeLillo, vies for contention as the Great American Novel. Spanning half
a century, and threaded by that most American of symbols, a simple baseball,
the book combines the broad sweep of narrated Americana with DeLillo’s usual
prose economy and accretional character developments. I shouldn’t really, but
I’m sure I will re-read the chilling The
Names before long.

Another American master at
the height of his creative powers was the Saul Bellow of Humboldt’s Gift. Charlie Citrine is another in a long line of the
loveable pawns of hubris in which Bellow specialises. You could make a strong
argument for DeLillo accepting the baton from Bellow, the authentic narration
of a haunted Americana
is the stock-in-trade of both men. Martin Amis, a personal friend of Bellow,
must have spent many hours in silent rage that he will never match the
effortless and erudite style of the Chicago
man. There is an infamous story of Amis taking the late Christopher Hitchens to
dinner chez Bellow, although it is a
story which ought to be read from both sides, both in Amis’s autiobiography Experience ­and Hitchens’ reminiscences Hitch-22.

With all these masters of
their art about the place, it seemed only natural to dip again into
Shakespeare’s beautiful island pastoral, The
Tempest. The Bard of Avon weaves the occult into several of his plays: the
fairy magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the witchcraft of Macbeth, the
deep Hermetic undercurrents of A Winter’s
Tale. But nowhere is it more pleasing than in the figures of Prospero,
Ariel and Caliban. Shakespeare may have had John Dee – court astrologer to
Elizabeth I – as his model for Prospero, and his invention of the name
‘Miranda’ is widely taken to be an allusion to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
Renaissance hermeticist and the author of the wonderful and
proto-existentialist Oration on the
Dignity of Man.

Having mislaid my rat-eared
copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,
I was forced into plan B; Doctor
Faustus. Posing as the biography of fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn,
the Second World War and the dark destiny of Germany
provide the canvas for Mann’s treatment of the Faust myth, running through the
blood of Germany
as it does. Mann is simply a colossus among novelists, and Doctor Faustus treats the porous border between genius and insanity
without the clumping truisms of other writers’ efforts to do the same. Borrowing
heavily from the life of Nietzsche for the circumstances of Leverkühn’s
tumbling down, the book also features the famous conversation with the devil, a
vignette to rival that of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. Also, Mann
achieves what, after Wilde’s caustic comments on the funeral of Dickens’s Little
Nell, might have been thought unachievable; the death of a child without the
schmaltzier type of pathos. It is very difficult to read Mann’s account of the
death of little Nepomuk Schneidewein and remain the proprietor of a dry eye.

These, then, are excursions
so pleasurable the first time round that we cannot resist another spin. I am
currently engaged in re-reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a book I definitely didn’t do justice to
three years ago. This will lead inevitably to another outing for the strange
and enticing 2066, the author’s magnum opus.

One of life’s great concerns,
as I watch 50 recede like a tide and look forward to 60 rolling around, is that
I will not get to read even 10% of the books I need to read. This is why I used
to fear re-reading as self-indulgent. Now, however, a second (or more) reading
of a sacred book is like discovering a loved one from the past has moved in
next door and would like nothing more than to chat across the garden fence. And
even if the act of reading again is self-indulgent, literature itself is full
of examples of the advantages of mixing the sinful with the sacred.

* From memory, I came across
this phrase in an essay by John Dewey on neurobiology. Litera scripta manet means, roughly, ‘that which is written down
remains/endures’.

Tuesday, 12 August 2014

It is a paradox that while we
have more information at our disposal than any other people in history, we have
fewer facts. For every standpoint there is an opposing one, equally fought for and
bolstered by just as many proclaimed ‘facts’. To support any position or its
opposite, and as the deconstructionists used to say, a reading of the text can
be organised. Take as an example global warming.

One side in the debate believes
mankind has accelerated climate change to an unsustainable degree – as in
Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph – while the other (think Bjorn
Lomborg, Mark Steyn and Christopher Booker) believes the role of man in global
warming (although it exists as the expression of a temporal cycle) is grossly
exaggerated to protect revenue streams via government funding, as well as emphasised
so the AGW coalition can bask in the sunlit uplands of the moral high ground,
that much-disputed territory. To take a reasoned stance in this tsunami of conflicting
information, I find myself reduced to applying the Three Wise Monkeys
principle. Simply put, if David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Miliband – aided
and abetted by their courtiers in the media – tell me something is the case,
the opposite must a fortiori be true.

But if the emergence of facts
from this morass moves at a glacial pace, and is even then hopelessly moot,
there is one unassailable truth that seems to be emerging from the chaos; the
decline and fall of the pax Americana.

With the phrase named for the
famous pax Romana of the Roman Empire – which also declined and fell, as Gibbon
notes – the world order dependent on America is no longer underwritten
by that waning power. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one could seriously doubt America’s
hegemony. Moralists can churn out verbiage about the bombing of Japan all they
like. It ended the war because America
said the war must be ended. America
spoke and the world listened. It was the rationale of the cosa nostra, but the war was over.

If you thought America’s
twin A-bombs were insane, prepare yourself for Harry Truman’s commentary on the
vaporisation of two cities. The atomic bomb, America’s atomic bomb, was ‘another
weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.’ This is reminiscent of F1 driver Alain
Prost commenting on an insanely dangerous manoeuvre by his nemesis, Brazilian
Ayrton Senna. Senna had almost run Prost, who backed down, off the track. The
sad-eyed Frenchman said in an interview; “How can you race against someone who
has God in their car?”

America does
not have God in its car anymore. It doesn’t have too much of anything. It still
has military muscle, but much of this is engaged tip-toeing around Islam both
at home and abroad. In the growing vacuum, Putin knows he can do what he likes.
So too Kim Jong-Un, Assad, Netanyahu, ISIS, Boko Haram or whoever else is this
week’s bad guy, today’s recipient of the two-minute hate. If the best that the
rest of the ‘free world’ can muster is a strongly worded rebuke from the UN,
tyrants will scarcely quake. In the coming realignment of global power, those
crushed under the tyrant’s heel won’t get very far calling Sweden.

And while the liberal-left
smiles smugly at the demise of the country they regard as the Great Satan just
as strongly as their new head-hacking friends, we may look ahead at what
replaces America.
When the Islamic and Chinese historians of the future come to write the history
of the 21st century – for we are told that the victors write the
histories – what will they say about the might, vanity and hubris of the United States?

They might say that here was
a country embodied as an ideal and underwritten by a Libertarian constitution.
They might also say that here was a superpower that scolded itself to death.
Just as Orwell wrote of England,
the US
is a family with the wrong members in control. America
differs from the UK
in that it never had to be sold multiculturalism because it was founded on that
very principle. But there is a new kind of liberalism abroad, a poisonous fraternity
every bit as dangerous as George W. Bush’s Skull and Bones.

Now that the magic fairy dust
has finally rubbed off Obama (note that the queue of Western politicians
clamouring for a photo-op has dried up), people can see the Emperor’s lack of
apparel. He has added $7 trillion to an already unsustainable debt. He has
personally overseen the de facto opening of the USA’s
border with Mexico.
He has publicly stated that ‘the future does not belong to those who slander
the prophet’, alluding to Mohammed. Add this to a list of near-impeachable
scandals – IRS, NSA, Benghazi,
Fast Track – and you can see the wisdom of putting an ex-community organiser mentored
by Communists and Black Liberation theologists in place as CEO of the world.

Financially, the game is up
for America.
As Mark Steyn writes, you can bail out Greece. There isn’t enough money in
the world to bail out America.

We have had an ambivalent
relationship with postwar America;
we snipe at it while we scrabble after the gewgaws of its culture. I’m so bored
with the USA,
sang The Clash, although they would soon be dressing as American rebel icons
and champing at the bit to tour there. We are all, even the progressive left
who dominate UK
ideology, in thrall to this cognitive dissonance.

One more fact amid the
flotsam and jetsam of modern dis- and misinformation. When those robed and
severe historians do come to pen The
Decline and Fall of the United States of America, they will take a little
time to ponder and puzzle – and find an appropriate translation for a phrase
alien to them – over the quaint solecism ‘human rights’. They will be a thing
of history, as well as one of the stoutest knots in the rope with which, as
Lenin predicted, the West hung itself.

Saturday, 9 August 2014

This week saw the 48th
anniversary of the death of American comic Lenny Bruce. I learned this from Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce!! a
1974 biography of Bruce by Albert Goldman based on the journalism of Lawrence
Schiller. If you like Lenny Bruce, or are interested in 1950s America, the
book is mandatory.

Goldman makes the words swing
on the page as a perfect complement to an artist performing in an age when
comedy wasn’t the new rock ‘n’ roll but the new jazz. And, like jazz, Bruce’s
audience were looking for the risqué, a flirtation with taboo, a walk on the
wild side.

“Yes, Lenny’s hot now. He did
business at that dump, the Duane. But this is not a little cocktail place. Here
is a very chic club for middle-aged people who live on Sutton Place and come by
after the show to drink a Scotch and Perrier and see a couple of French or
English acts, something witty, clever, sophisticated. Lenny Bruce is different.
He’s with obscenities and fast talking and inside humour and hostility. People
will be offended. There’ll be walkouts.”

In an age made tiresome by
the offence industry, we find it difficult to understand what offence genuinely
meant for early baby-boomer America.
If Bruce played a London comedy club tonight with his bits about ‘queers’ and
‘cocksuckers’ and ‘spades’, any walkouts would represent a criticism of
derogatory language used about minorities. When Bruce was playing to
sophisticated 1950s wine-and-diners, any walkouts would be because Bruce had
reminded them that those minorities even existed. And this reminder had to come
from a wise-cracking, irreverent Jew. It could not have come from any other
quarter of American society, a society which, Goldman writes, “more than any
society since Ancient Rome has taken show business as the symbol of its national
values.”

Bruce was controversial in a
way we can’t imagine. The police attended his shows despite receiving no
complaints from the public. He was routinely arrested and harassed. He ended
his life obsessed with the law, reading constantly and becoming conversant with
obscenity precedent.

Now that the chattering
classes are unshockable outside the strict cordon sanitaire they have thrown
around the minorities – ethnic, sexual, religious, gender-based – there could
not be a Lenny Bruce. Instead, we have Russell Brand.

It seems significant that
1950s America
had Lenny Bruce and we have Russell Brand. Another famous ex-junkie, Brand is
not hassled in the street by vengeful cops looking to bust a bigmouth in the
news. Instead, he is lionised and pawed over at government committees on drug
abuse, staunchly defending the idea that addiction is a medical condition and
not a lifestyle choice. He clashed with Peter Hitchens over this and, while for
me Hitchens won the argument at a stroll, Brand employed all his childish
cultural prestidigitation to twit Hitchens and claim a victory for hip. But
Russell Brand is not hip. He is a deeply unfunny multi-millionaire. Lenny Bruce
was trying to rustle up cash to score even when he’d made it. Also, Bruce was
surprisingly anxious about being disliked on a moral plane. He wrote to trial
judges imploring them not to judge him morally. It is a certainty, for me, that
Lenny Bruce would not have left the salacious messages on an old man’s tape
machine, as Brand and Jonathan Ross did. But Brand could not perform a piece
based on Adolf Eichmann – chilling, genius - and make it work. Und we made them into soap…

The other main theme of the
book is Bruce’s crippling drug habit, and this is truly shocking even in our
jaded times. Bruce was a phenomenal junkie who could have given Johnny Thunders
a run for his money. He would shoot anything, and these are the sections of the
book – and there are many of them – that are hardest to take. The topography of
the junkie, all puncture marks, embolisms and sores, is dwelt on. If there is
such a thing as a ‘war on drugs’, the book’s sections on Bruce and his habit
ought to be included as a deterrent. Eventually, and inevitably, it killed him,
and Goldman is firmly on the side of the conspiracy theorists concerning
Bruce’s corpse, bloated and punctured in his Hollywood bathroom. The setting,
said Bruce’s friends, was all wrong for a Lenny shoot ‘em up, too organised,
missing chaos. A police officer at the scene is said to have shown friends of Bruce
photographs of the corpse. “I thought you might like to see these. They could
make one helluva album cover.”

My own introduction to Lenny
Bruce came seven years ago when I chanced across The Trials of Lennie Bruce by Ronald Collins and David Skover. In
the back sleeve of this book – drier than Goldman and Schiller but no less
informative – was tucked a free CD, narrated by Nat Hentoff, which featured
snippets of Bruce live. It was the first time I had heard Bruce, and so my
introduction to Thank You Mask Man, one
of the most famous bits by the self-titled ‘Superjew’.

In this skit, the grateful
townspeople demand to know why The Lone Ranger never waits around for a
‘thankyou’ after he has saved them. Kimosabe reasons that he would have neither
the time nor the inclination to save them at all if he spent all day receiving
gratitude. However, for them, he tries it, and is soon obsessed.

“'Thankyou MaskMan.'
Mmm, I like that. I’m going to get a book. I’ll put it in the Thankyou Mask Man
book. Now, I’m going down to the mailbox to see if the Thankyou Mask Man man
has been today.”

An increasingly crazed Lone
Ranger is then offered a range of prizes, chooses Tonto, and turns out to be
gay. It’s iconoclastic in a time when that was still possible and, more importantly,
it is very funny. It is refreshing in an age when everyone is funny, and yet no
one makes me laugh. Goodbye, Lenny Bruce.

Saturday, 2 August 2014

Shortly before film director Stanley Kubrick died, he was at work on his
final movie when he gave an interview to film and television journalists. One
television listings magazine ran Kubrick’s comments, including his explanation
of the source for his last work, Eyes Wide Shut. The film, Kubrick
explained, was inspired by a German novel written in 1926 by an Austrian,
Arthur Schnitzler, and titled, apparently, Traumaville.

Schnitzler’s book is usually translated into English as ‘Dream Story’, and
this is the accepted translation of the German ‘Traumnovelle’, which is what
Kubrick had actually said but which had been misheard either live or via a
recording as ‘Traumaville’. It is perfect; a very modern mistake and a place, a
location, is born.

Traumaville is where we all live now. A hybrid of Plato’s Republic and
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, a
combination of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange and a department store catalogue, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon ghost-written by a PR team launching a new fashion line. A strange
mix of the real, the unreal, and the surreal, Traumaville feels increasingly
like home, if not quite as secure.

In Traumaville, an increasingly desperate political class is trying to hold
on to power by a combination of deception and selective truth-telling. A
powerful media class struggles to maintain a Potemkin village of culture and
social cohesion. The inhabitants of Traumaville are fed just enough
distractions to keep them away from the sanctum sanctorum of the ruling
classes but, like little Toto uncovering the Wizard of Oz operating gears and
levers at the back of his machinery, those inhabitants are slowly beginning to
understand both that Traumaville is not what it seems, and that it is about to
change into somewhere considerably more dangerous. The political class and its
media courtiers will continue to deny, like the wizard, that there is anything
of significance to see.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” is what the old man says
in the film after Toto’s unveiling. But there is something to see, and the
simple folk of Traumaville are beginning, in their twos and threes and notably
online – Burke’s ‘little platoons’, perhaps, in virtual form - to become more
inquisitive.

The classic, jokey English postcard used to read ‘Wish you were here’. You
already are, whether or not you live in rainy, gorgeous, fading old England. You
live in Traumaville, and these essays, each with a 1,000-word limit, are
postcards from Traumaville, short notes from a troubled town.

In an effort to understand
the current troubles in and around Gaza,
I elected to move from the busy plains of media discussion and graze instead in
the rich pastures of Amazon, where historical books can often be downloaded
without troubling my already parlous bank account. I came across The Making of a Nation: The Beginnings of
Israel’s History by Charles Foster Kent. Now, this book must join the lengthy
queue that is my reading list, and join at the back and not jostle or push in
or cheat its new neighbours. What will detain us here is one of the customer
reviews of the book, by a person called ‘Zero’:

“I was expecting a history of
the modern state of Israel
including the mistreatment of the Palestinians. This is a horrible rehash of
religious myths. The Bible does a much better job of retelling these urban
legends.”

In passing, we note the
delight Freud and Nietzsche would have taken in the notion of a ‘horrible
rehash of religious myths’, perhaps finding it an apt description of
civilisation. Charming too is Zero’s gracious approval of the Bible as a more
informative source than Mr Kent.

More importantly, what this
snippet tells us is that readers – particularly around an emotive subject such
as Israel
– are opinion-holders, and are loath to have those opinions undermined by
reading unwelcome material. I forget the name of the psychologist who minted
the phrase ‘the me report’ to describe people’s behaviour when garnering facts
from the media – a word which in itself contains ‘me’ – but it serves to
explain the type of behaviour which uses expectation and prejudice to bolster
what other psychologists have called the ‘self-serving bias’, or the tendency
to boost one’s self-esteem as a shield for the sensitive ego.

Generally, we like to read
material – rapidly becoming materiel in the case of Israel
and Palestine –
which reinforces our beliefs, and we shun that which undermines those articles
of faith. Although we ought to ‘catholicise’ our reading choices and consider
opposing viewpoints, we are pack animals unwilling to become runts, pariahs or pharmakoi.

‘Zero’, then, expected a book
with ‘Israel’ in its title to conform to his or her political and emotional
expectations and desires, those modish trappings which show a tribal allegiance
every bit as relevant today as the Twelve Tribes of Israel were in ancient
times. Again;

“I was expecting a history of
the modern state of Israel
including the mistreatment of the Palestinians.”

For Zero, there is no
possibility of education as to whether or not there has been ‘mistreatment’ of
‘Palestinians’. For Zero, there simply has been such, and his/her choice of
reading matter will be circumscribed by this shibboleth or totem (the language
of Freud can never be far away here). We are reminded of then Cabinet Minister
Patricia Hewitt in 2006, talking of commissioning research ‘to show’ the
advantages of home birthing. Scientists would be surprised at this use of
‘research’.

Now that Twitter, weblogs and
the internet in general have granted everyone a voice and the ability to
express an opinion, what holds the attention is rarely those opinions
themselves but their symptomatology, the allegiances to which they refer, as
red spots refer to the presence of the measles virus.

Take Twitter as an example, where
there is insufficient textual space to develop ideas further than a version of
the ‘Boo/Hurray theory’, as defined in The
Oxford
Companion to Philosophy:

“Apt nickname for crude
version of emotivism [Note: Emotivism is a theory of ethics]. The theory states
that we use ethical words to express our feelings or attitudes and to evoke
similar feelings or attitudes in other people. Hence, ‘x is wrong’ or ‘x is
right’ amount only to ‘Boo!’ or ‘Hurray!’”

Of course, there is question-begging
here; if I say murder is wrong then of course I am saying ‘Boo!’ to murder, in
a rather childishly expressed way. Where the Boo/Hurray theory functions in
modern social media is at the level of expectation and allegiance. In other
words, if I am a creature of the Left, and the Left is against fracking, I may declare
myself against fracking without taking the trouble to read up on it and form my
own opinion. If I am of the Right, I might champion the free market without making
much effort to understand its full range of consequences. Flat-packed, tribally
affiliated opinion is a symptom of the internet age.

This, of course, leads to a
deal of cognitive dissonance, or the holding of two conflicting opinions at the
same time. ‘Boo! to homophobia!’ says the adherent of the Progressive Left and,
at the same time, ‘Hurray for Islam!’, seeing no contradiction. But peer group
affiliation has no problem with the law of contradiction and can, like
Carroll’s White Queen in Wonderland, easily believe six impossible things
before breakfast.

On the subject of Gaza, the conflict acts
as a filter for opinion, and expectation and the self-serving bias are at the
forefront of the opinion wars. Broadly, the Left holds Israel
responsible for intimidation, disproportionate response, ethnic cleansing and a
host of other crimes. Similarly, the Right – these are necessarily broad brush
strokes – champions Israel’s
right to defend itself as a legitimate democracy under de facto attack. There
has been a deal of discussion on the virtual Right concerning the failure of
the virtual Left to acknowledge, for example, the hundreds killed in Syria each
week. The Left, say the Right, are only interested in Muslims killed by Jews,
not in Muslims killed by other Muslims. Many opinionators [neologism alert!]
hold that criticism of Israel
is just Jew-hatred in a masquerade mask.

Whether there is a right or
wrong to the Gaza
conflict brings us to morality, and that is a subject for another day. There
are certainly twin booming choruses of Boo! And Hurray! Meanwhile the
combatants swap high explosives, innocents on both sides are killed, and
opinion in a foxhole is something of a luxury. What did you expect?

Friday, 1 August 2014

“To be born an Englishman is to win first prize in God’s
lottery.” Not Dr Johnson or Rudyard Kipling, but English businessman and
politician Cecil Rhodes, who gave his name to racist, colonialist Rhodesia before that south African country
turned itself around and became the beacon of democracy and economic success we
know today as Zimbabwe.

Times change, of course, and although there is still a first prize for winning the
divine lottery, it is not simply to be born an Englishman, certainly not just
at the moment or any time soon. No, the winning ticket this week goes to those,
like me, who were born an English baby-boomer. And it is still a prize to be
cherished, as long as you value sheer entertainment. In the comically titled United Kingdom,
the only way to deal with our current decline and eventual and inevitable ruin
is to relax and have yourself a good time. As our young London waitresses say but don’t mean; Enjoy!

We British baby-boomers may have caused the coming
collapse of the UK – perhaps we should be re-christened baby-busters - but that
is not going to stop us pulling up a deck-chair, pouring ourselves a pint of
warm bitter, digging into our cod and chips and watching the entertainment on
offer. Like fictional Englishman Harry Flashman observing the doomed Light
Brigade at Crimea in George MacDonald Fraser’s
Flashman at the Charge, it might be
quite something to watch my country rushing in exactly the wrong direction. So,
if you’re sitting comfortably, on with the show!

Gasp while our political elite imports the world’s
underclass in the name of tolerance and diversity! Marvel while eco-loons
demand that you live in a pile of turf and eat rabbit-pellet-and-twig ragout
before watering the family horse with hopper-fresh dew, just as they catch a
‘plane to the latest AGW-junket in Brazil! Roll up, roll up! See our
Prime Minister on TV, the day after a soldier is beheaded (also on TV) on a London street by
Koran-quoting Muslims, and then explain that the butchery was a betrayal of Islam!

Swoon in amazement at the Lawrence Report, produced after
a black teenager was killed by genuine racists, and which states that any
incident is now deemed to be racist if any one party to the incident believes
it to be so! Applaud as Members of Parliament claim expenses from the
tax-payers for moat-cleaning, second homes, duck-houses and porn movies! You
won’t believe your eyes as crippled ex-servicemen beg you for change while
imams and their wives receive state benefits!

You want political prisoners, folks? Right this way!
Tommy Robinson, ex-leader of the anti-Islamist English Defence League (EDL).
Tommy was spuriously imprisoned for 18 months for falsifying mortgage
documents. On release, a condition was that he had no contact with EDL members,
a caveat entirely unrelated to his crime. Paul Weston, erstwhile colleague of
Mr Robinson, was arrested for quoting from The
River War by national war hero turned pariah, Sir Winston Churchill.

From the greatest empire on earth to the greatest show on
earth! From having an empire on which the sun never sets, the UK now has a PR sharpster for a
Prime Minister, a certifiable lunatic next in line for the throne, and a state
broadcaster who demonstrably despises the majority of the people who fund it,
and who will imprison you if you don’t pay your licence fee.

Bravo! We export talented engineers to the Middle East to help those unable to extract the oil they
are sitting on top of, and in return import crazed jihadis equally well trained
in their area of expertise. More! Our police force has been re-named a police
service, and its notorious failure to attend simple domestic burglaries has
given rise to the joke that the quickest way to get the British police to come
to your house is to tell them a homophobic racist has stolen your child
pornography. Encore! British emergency services stand and watch while children
drown because their health and safety authorisation does not allow them to
enter the water.

You will be on the edge of your seats as British prisons
are sociologically engineered to become micro-caliphates, taxation is diverted
from innovative private sector revenue into a public sector slush fund for
neo-Marxist local authorities, and the entertainment industry is encouraged to
become an IQ-free pigsty of celebrities famous for being famous.

Laugh at the realisation that your grandmother would be
better cared for in a British jail than a British care home, particularly if
she converts to paganism. Snigger at your child’s history homework, as you help
her write a letter to an imaginary African friend explaining that slavery was
the fault of white people. Give a cheery wave as you walk to the
graffiti-smeared train station to board an over-crowded, late train, all the
while scrutinised by more CCTV cameras per capita than North Korea.

And games? We got ‘em! Try to get through those tricky
‘Shariah zones’ of east London
if you’re a Jew, a gay, a drinker or even a woman! Guess which coloured
recycling bin to put your tin cans in and on which day, then watch those crazy
council guys fine you for getting the answer wrong, wrong, wrong! Take care
now, as you choose what you can and can’t say on social media to avoid that
early-morning knock at the door!

Then there is the sideshow of the European Union (EU),
which the UK
cannot leave even as its component economies crash and burn. Why, that old
goombah EU has failed to have its accounts signed off for almost two decades!
How we laughed! It falsified accounting to allow two of its member states – now
economic basket cases – to join! Its unelected leaders read like a history of
Communism! And our political gauleiters and their lickspittle media courtiers
just can’t get enough! Now, that’s entertainment.

And don’t worry, folks. There’s more to come, and we’ll
be right back with you after the break.